22 January 2010

It’s easy to see why Tyler Perry signed on to this movie as an executive producer while it traveled the festival circuit; his critic-proof bank-busters have a strange dual politics that Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire borrows: a call for personal responsibility that also recognizes the need for a social support system. It takes a village...I guess those two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive; that’s just what I’ve learned from polarizing cable news programs. Anyway, it’s emerging as the New Politics of the black middle-to-upper class: people of color need to stick together. But they also need to take care of themselves. (Because Precious’ horrible, horrible mother is a welfare abuser, the movie also strikes me as an argument for Clintonian welfare reform.) Precious is like Madea Goes to Harlem Hell.

Ed Wood’s reputation as “The Worst Filmmaker Ever” is bullshit; his talentlessness is a myth, begat in the Age of Irony as a haughty reaction to the filmmaker’s conspicuous compromises in the face of budgetary constraints. It’s easy to laugh, for example, at his Bride of the Monster from 1955—at its poorly edited-in stock footage, at many of its non-professional actors—but it’s just as easy to appreciate its virtues: the touching details (the police captain who pours a glass of water for his pet bird), its critical depiction of police (callously rounding up hobos, bullying newspaper peddlers), its sense of humor (“this is the 20th Century!” the police captain says. “Don’t count on it,” a reporter replies), its battle of the sexes banter, and its exploration of marriage vis-à-vis the vanquishing power of love.

19 January 2010

Movies themselves are the long con in The Brothers Bloom, a romantic metafilm about the mendacity of storytelling that unfolds with the sophistication and guessing-game complexity of a Tony Gilroy contraption—albeit without the movie-star-glamour fetish. That’s not to say the film isn’t without Big Names: Adrian Brody, putting his naturally mopey anguish to good use, stars as little bro to Mark Ruffalo; together, they constitute the eponymous, world-famous swindlers, out on one last con: to bamboozle a million smackers from eccentric heiress/hermit Rachel Weisz (never better). Ruffalo, a sort of stand-in for writer-director Johnson, writes the narratives for their months-long rackets, and Brody—a stand-in for…himself? The actor, longing to break free of prescribed boundaries—makes them click. Weisz is us, the audience, longing to be strung along on an adventure, even if it’s all a ruse.

Johnson’s previous feature, the estimable Brick, had an easy hook: John Huston meets John Hughes. But this film refuses to be so easily pinned down. Style (and substance) and flair burst out of every frame and speaker; Johnson—hell, everybody—is firing on all cylinders here, with a twisty story played out by top-notch actors engaging in expressionistic gestures against ornate backdrops. The director evokes a host of others: Wes Anderson, in the dandy preciousness and reverence for anachronism (trans-Atlantic steamers!?!); Quentin Tarantino, in the dialogue’s eloquence; Charlie Kaufman, in the storytelling self-awareness; and any of the Old Masters, in the expert visual style (not least in the elegant slow motions or graceful tracking shots). But Johnson is no derivation or sum of his influences. He’s an American eclectic, on the cusp of (God willing!) a long and exciting career. Grade: A

15 January 2010

The circa '97 St. Petersburg of Loren Cass, a classy low-budget indie about Floridian disaffection, is somnolent and sickly and sad: while sleepy jazz seeps from car stereos, and blacktops are so devoid of cars you can lie right down on them, the gas stations and city buses are bathed in an emetic green glow, the diners awash in blue shadows like the cover of a Sinatra record. By day, it's a sunny American town; by night, it's on the verge of dissolution, disintegration: the high school hallways are eerily empty, the traffic signs corroded--even the graffiti is fading. The streets, meanwhile, pulsate with violence.

Set in the aftermath of the 1996 riots sparked off by a police shooting, Loren Cass features spurts of abrupt, seemingly unprovoked, racially motivated melees that recede just as quickly as they erupted. The fists flail between angsty young men; the adults are absent: either asleep in front of a staticky television, sitting stock still in their easy chairs, or sneaking swigs from a desk drawer bottle. (The film's only young woman is too busy waiting tables and bedding men of all colors to get involved.)

So Ben, the director of Juno strikes again! This time, with perhaps the most vexing and offensive film of the Oscar season. (Hey, just like two years ago!) Not the worst—I still love Clooney, even if this is his blandest and most forgettable work in years—but Up in the Air easily sums up what’s wrong with the Oscarbrow: it’s a dumb movie cloaked in respectability, quirky enough—even if it doesn’t have a hamburger telephone—to seem Original without ever actually being unique. Or, you know, smart.

[...]

The movie’s dripping with zeitgeist and yet already feels dated. (For starters, its airline check-in scenes seem soooo pre-underpants bomber.) Worst of all, like Juno and Reitman fils’ first film Thank You For Smoking, it’s smugly conservative but hides its politics behind the hipness of cynicism and alienation...

08 January 2010

Vampire fiction has an abundance of possible allegorical avenues to explore, and Daybreakers takes a short walk down just about all of them: is this sleek slice of dystopian futurism a parable about the unsustainability of current farming practices? Or peak oil? Or drug addiction? AIDS? Diabetes? Undocumented workers? Corporate malfeasance? Warmongering? And how does the Holocaust and rape imagery fit in? Well, it doesn't, really. And, regarding which of those metaphors Daybreakers sticks to, the answer is: none of the above. But, as with Park Chan-wook's recent, similarly scatterbrained vampire-epic Thirst, that isn't necessarily a flaw.

According to the movies, to be a young white male in the 21st century is to be a pussy. Weenies dithered through the last decade's films, from the diffident mumblers of Mutual Appreciation to the excruciatingly sensitive manboy of Garden State. But the very funny Youth in Revolt, a peripatetic nightmare of frustrated coitus a la Superbad, relentlessly mocks that wimpy and insufferable hipster-delicate type. Adapted by Gustin Nash from C.D. Payne's Portnoy-for-kids, the movie follows Nick Twisp (Michael Cera), a mild-mannered teen with developed tastes—his room is littered with Sinatra's Capitol output...on vinyl—and a rabid, adolescent sex-obsession (the movie opens with Nick masturbating). Too timid, he constructs Francois Dillinger (Cera again), a "supplementary persona," a mustachioed Mr. Hyde, a Tyler Durden in white pants and Hunter Thompson shades, to encourage him to be as badass as he needs to be to win and keep the girl of his dreams, Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday), a babe who knows her Mizoguchi from her Ozu.

Dear moviemakers,Every movie based on a popular novel need not have its soundtrack saturated with voiceover. I know you guys (none of you are women, right?) think it’s a way to honor the audience-beloved source material, but it’s actually disrespectful to the words that once sat silently on the page. Because it shows that you have no concept of the differences between media—what works in print versus on a screen. In this case, Mr. Jackson: rather than honor the spirit of Alice Sebold’s novel by retaining chunks of its language, you have merely photocopied it, fashioning a blurry facsimile with the margins cut off.

But really...what else would you expect from a movie without the deep-down beauty its title suggests, but only a superficial attractiveness with a vacuous core? There’s a difficult story buried somewhere in this movie about freeing our souls from the psycho/material miseries that weigh them down, about finding numinous liberation in Letting Go. All that remains, though, are some bromides about the afterlife that are about as comforting as a pat on the shoulder from a stranger.